Several nights ago due to a strange and extended bout of insomnia, have jumped online into a chat room and stumbled onto a extremely bizarre and yet fascinating discussion about the population of the earth. The people you find online are very unusual, but it’s this kind of discussion which the internet truly is meant for. Radical ideas spreading across the country and the world, changing and refining themselves and taking root in fertile minds… such as myself!
The discussion started off by the fact that the population of the world is growing, and because it’s growing we are putting a drain on the worlds resources. Oil is the first resource that that may go, but eventually it’s going to get to something far more important… food and water. Once we reach a certain point, what we discussed as the “population bottleneck,” we’ll have too many people on the planet for the resources we have and entire populations will die out and the human population will decrease instead of increase.
The major solution provided was mandatory sterilization.
Okay, take a deep breath, relax, and let’s look beyond the obvious emotional response, just as an exercise.
Now for the race to continue, we can’t allow unchecked human growth on the planet forever. We need a plan at some point. Sterilization starts to sound appealing when you think of billions of people starving and living like ancient man trying to scrounge for fertile land to grow a few meager crops. Dystopian movies we’ve made so far can’t compare to the possible reality.
Some people rejected this idea, that sterilization was just wrong. I personally am not suggesting it now, but if things become drastic it might be necessary. Also, the religious may reject this, as many more extreme religious sects look upon reproduction, even birthing 19 children, a right. To quote a cliché, there are people starving in Africa and you want to have 19 children so they can eat up food the Africans can’t get?
Others voted for sterilization based on an educational standard. These were of course those who thought themselves elite but in my opinion would have been the first to be snipped.
The only fair solution I could see would be a mandatory across the board limit of one child per family. If you had a second without permission, you automatically get sterilized. If a couple is infertile they can give their right to a lottery. To get rights to a second child, join the lottery. If for some reason your child dies before they are 18, you can have another. And of course all rules are subject to review depending on where the population is in several years.
This would have to being implemented in most developed nations have an effect, and its an extreme measure, but its an interesting exercise in “what if.” Before you reject outrageous ideas, ask what would you do if the population grew too large? If you don’t think it can, your imagination is far too limited.
I for one hope we simply develop reliable space travel by that point and find new planets to settle so we can spread out.
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